Call for Community Testing: 3.9.3 GridFTP

What is a "Call for Community Testing"?

A Call for Community Testing is a mechanism to notify our users that new Globus code is available for testing in the field. Through these calls, the Globus Alliance hopes to expose its code to a wide variety of usage scenarios early in its development process. The ultimate goals are to catch bugs that have historically been found only after final releases, and to elicit feedback from the community on ways our software can be improved.

Participating in the GridFTP Testing Call is easy!

  1. Optional: Consider sending mail to testing@globus.org to let us know that you're helping out and describing what you intend to test.
  2. Install the software in a non-production environment. Use the 3.9.3 distribution from http://www-unix.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/development/; the code can also be retrieved directly from CVS using the tag [tag].
  3. Exercise the software.
  4. Log your experiences in http://bugzilla.globus.org/globus/ under the "[component]" product. Please mention 3.9.3 explicitly in the body of the report.
  5. Optional: Consider sending descriptions of your tests to testing@globus.org so that we might use them to build standard tests in the future.
  6. If you have any questions are comments about the process, send an email to testing@globus.org.

Testing period

The testing period for this call is Now till December 17th.

About GridFTP

GridFTP is a high-performance, secure, reliable data transfer protocol optimized for high-bandwidth wide-area networks. The GridFTP protocol is based on FTP, the highly-popular Internet file transfer protocol. We have selected a set of protocol features and extensions defined already in IETF RFCs and added a few additional features to meet requirements from current data grid projects.

Reasons for testing GridFTP

This is a particularly critical testing period for GridFTP. We have completley re-implemented the server and added striping functionality. One of the keys to the success of GridFTP has been its stability and we need to insure that this new implementation is rock solid and completely protocol compliant.

Technology dependencies

GridFTP depends on the following GT components:

  • Pre-WS Authentication / Authorization
  • C Common Libraries
  • XIO

GridFTP depends on the following 3rd party software:

  • OpenSSL (version included in release)

Environment/build parameters and other special conditions to test

  1. Testing any client code you have written
  2. Testing between our server and any other GridFTP servers
  3. Testing large numbers of clients against a server
  4. "Job storms" i.e., hitting the server rapidly in succession
  5. Error responses (does it fall over, give you a useless error response, or give you an error response you can react to)
  6. Striped installations

Release notes

Release notes for the 3.9.3 GridFTP can be found here.